Guillermo del Toro first read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” when he was 11, which was three years after he started making movies with his father’s Super 8 camera. The book and the passion for filmmaking have been mainstays in his life ever since, culminating in a long-delayed but inevitable rendezvous in his new movie “Frankenstein.” The film mixes Shelley’s original with imagery inspired by James Whale’s iconic 1930s movies “Frankenstein” and “The Bride of Frankenstein,” along with personal touches from a career spent exploring horror and other genres in movies like “Cronos,” “Hellboy,” “Nightmare Alley” and the Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Pinocchio” and “The Shape of Water.”
In a way, all of del Toro’s movies have delved into themes that can be found in Shelley’s story: tension between creator and creation, outsiders who are shunned as freaks, the beauty in things that society finds ugly and strained father-son dynamics. The last is particularly relevant to “Frankenstein,” which finds the Mexican-born writer-director mining his relationship with his own father, who won the lottery but was kidnapped in 1998 and held for more than two months until a ransom was paid, and who never talked about the ordeal until he was close to the end of his life.
In November in Los Angeles, del Toro sat down with TheWrap and Australian actor Jacob Elordi, who plays the creature brought to life by Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). The director was coming off a week in which he traveled to five cities in five days to promote his film, which played in theaters for three weeks before heading to Netflix, where it debuted at No. 1 on the streamer’s Global Top 10. “You can feel the awareness of the movie connecting with the public,” he said after his travels. “This is alchemy. You never know which thing you didn’t do would’ve mattered, so you do everything.”
Guillermo, you told us at TIFF that for your version of “Frankenstein,” you took elements from Mary Shelley’s book, from her life, from James Whale’s movies and from your own life. What about this movie feels autobiographical to you?
GUILLERMO DEL TORO Most of it, really. There are moments that are obliquely autobiographical. Others are direct moments that I have lived through, some in my regular life as a son or as a father, or things that happened during the kidnapping of my dad, or things that I figured out during those difficult times. And that aligns nicely for me with the theme that I always wanted to decipher, which is fathers and sons — including God and Jesus, my dad and I, me and my kids and so forth.
Also, Mary Shelley spent an inordinate amount of her literary career trying to decipher her own father in three books, particularly her book “Mathilda,” which is disturbing and daring for its time. And her last two books have terrifying father figures. So she never solved it. (Laughs) I thought, well, maybe I can articulate part of that.
Jacob, is there any sense in which you looked for a personal connection to play Frankenstein’s creature?
JACOB ELORDI For me, it’s impossible to create a piece of work without it being autobiographical. I don’t think I can appear on screen without giving something, even if the majority of it is unconscious. But I did feel it, particularly when I had to forgive Oscar’s character. You know when you go to a government office and there’s a picture of the president hanging on the wall? (Laughs) My dad’s portrait was in my head that whole day, and I couldn’t shake it. And as soon as we finished the scene, I called him straight away, just so I could hear his voice.
DEL TORO And at the end of that day, you said, “I have nothing else to give.” And then we did it again the next day. (Laughs)
ELORDI It turns out I was wrong.
If Mary Shelley never figured out her father issues, does making a movie like this help you?
DEL TORO Well, you don’t have to. What you offer as a filmmaker or a storyteller is never solutions. I mean, who can talk about solutions outside of a manual? You can talk about experience: This is what I’ve lived through. I’ve lived through the indifference and the eventual graceful acceptance of the cycles of the day as something much larger and somewhat divine that goes beyond me. And I can surrender to it. I can tell you that with a few images toward the end of the movie. I’m not going to take you through any answers, but I’m going to show you an experience emotionally.
ELORDI I have a question. Do you find answers through the process, or more questions?
DEL TORO This movie is the only time I have method directed. It was the only time I experienced that in a way that was conducive to insight, but the answers are yet to come. I recognize a huge void that I had not processed.
This is obviously a movie you’ve wanted to make for decades. But would you have been ready to make it earlier in your career?
DEL TORO No. I would’ve made it as a son. You can be a father and keep behaving like a son, like life owes you something from your childhood. If you’re doing that when you’re already a father, that is most unfortunate, but it happens. So I’d much rather do the movie at this age, where I have gone through enough to understand the fallibility and the tragic blind side that can come with a profession as fraught as fatherhood.
As a kid, I used to play monsters in the backyard. But Jacob, when you became interested in acting, did you ever imagine playing this kind of role?
ELORDI When I think about the origins of wanting to act, it’s in makeup and costumes, with a big sword that glows in the dark. Or something with tentacles. That’s what I gravitated toward when I was younger, because that’s what I wanted to see on my screen. But then you become a teenager and you start watching films with heavier themes, and you think, Oh, I want to play a junkie, or I want to play an alcoholic. I want to play great suffering. You get all these actor ideas.
But the most primal thing that I ever wanted to play was probably a creature in a big coat with a big collar that crashes through the door. You don’t grow up being like, “I want to play truthful relationships, and I want sincerity.” No, you want to pull a rabbit out of a hat and shoot a machine gun and set something on fire and then kiss the girl. You want to play.
Guillermo, why were you initially attracted to “Frankenstein”?
DEL TORO I was always attracted to the fairy-tale aspect of horror, even as a kid. The books that my father had in his library, like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” were supposed to be classics for children. But both (Oscar) Wilde and (Robert Louis) Stevenson examined really deep, profound stuff. And then at 11 I stumbled on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” This is hardly light reading! (Laughs) She is asking the most urgent questions in a very haphazard way. And structurally, the 1818 edition is full of ideas almost at war with each other: charity, kindness, brutality, rage, which I believe Mary Shelley must have had untapped reservoirs of.
Did you read the book before you saw James Whale’s “Frankenstein”?
DEL TORO No. I saw James Whale first, and then I read the book. The part that attracted me the most was the journey of the creature.
I’d much rather do the movie at this age, where I have gone through enough to understand the fallibility and the tragic blind side that can come with a profession as fraught as fatherhood.
Guillermo del Toro
Jacob, I hear that when you were in the makeup chair for 10-hour stretches, you would watch old movies.
ELORDI We would, yeah. I was stealing from those movies constantly. We’d watch “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and I saw (Charles Laughton) do something when he’s on the top of the tower and thought, Oh, I’m gonna see if I can do something like that.
DEL TORO We watched the silent cinema, German expressionism, “Ivan the Terrible”… There’s a language that Whale and (Boris) Karloff drank from that was straight from expressionism — the shadows and light and the mannered angles and the hands. We were very startled by those hands. In silent cinema, every gesture was already codified. If you raised your right eyebrow or your left eyebrow, it meant different things.
ELORDI It’s so large but so subtle.
You could say the same thing about the creature. He’s enormous and imposing, but you need to convey a lot beyond size and menace.
ELORDI The screenplay suggests so much more than big and imposing and powerful. You’re immediately aware of the subtlety that you have to find. I remember staring at my arms for hours in the makeup chair and trying to figure out if I could make different sections of the same muscle move at different times in different ways. There was this kind of dance that had to be done between a purely physical approach and the nuance of what the screenplay was saying.
DEL TORO What was remarkable for me, watching every day and then editing for two hours every morning before showing up to set, was the way that in the baby stage of the creature, every reaction was immediate. Victor yells at him and he reacts like a dog rearing back. And then at the end of that cycle, the way he raises the chains and says, “Elizabeth” is deliberate. He’s already older. I love the way he tracked all that. He’s transitioning to a human being that has a moral compass and an ethical compass and a sense of right and wrong.
Given how long you had wanted to make this movie and how much you had thought about it, I’m sure you needed to set aside ideas that had been in your head for years.
DEL TORO Yeah. But that’s easy. When the thing that comes into view is better than what you had, you recognize the opportunity. Discovering the chemistry between Jacob and Mia (Goth) or him and Oscar, that changes the way the creature grows for me. You can play chess with yourself in your own mind, but when you play basketball with a bunch of people, you have to be open to dribble and to pass. If you’re still playing chess with people watching you, it is not filmmaking. It is something else that happens in solitary. (Laughs)
Every “Frankenstein” movie needs a great creation sequence. You’re in trouble if you don’t nail it.
DEL TORO Yeah. You have to. But you have to do it differently than anyone else has done it. Not for the sake of being different, but illuminating in a different way. The anatomical part of it is always shot like a horror movie. There’s always Dutch angles (in which the camera is tilted) and deep shadows. And the electrical storm is shot rather operatically, but everything goes right and the hand moves or the eye flickers.
In my movie, everything is going wrong. I thought it was interesting to be very harmonious at first, like a waltz. (Victor has) finally got the anatomical model right, and it’s the happiest he’s ever been. And then the lightning rod breaks, the batteries explode and the creature apparently doesn’t come alive. In the book, he goes to bed and he wakes up with the creature watching him. And I was fortunate enough that nobody else attempted it that way, so it was there for the taking.
Jacob, was it challenging to figure out how to do the reanimation scene?
ELORDI Yeah, yeah. For that scene in particular, the thought was, What was in him that when he came to life, he went to his father? How many flights of stairs did he climb? How did he get up? The movement from the table to the floor, I had to get that image of the Kenneth Branagh film (“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” in which Dr. Frankenstein and the creature are slipping on a floor covered with water) out of my head. But there is something so strong in Guillermo’s image of him opening the bed canopy, looking at Victor with nothing except maybe curiosity.
DEL TORO That’s scary and beautiful. How did he get there? I remember (prosthetic makeup designer) Mike (Hill) and I talked about putting two streaks of tears on the creature’s face, because at some point he got lost and he must have cried and looked for anybody alive. And he was looking at Victor like, Is that alive? Is that me? Because I think the beautiful thing in the movie is a father and a son trying to recognize each other. And they are a reflection of each other. That’s why mirrors are a theme in the movie. The creature looks at Victor, and then Victor moves and the creature moves. And then Victor says, “The sun is life” and the creature raises his arms. That is the scene I liked the most in the book.
There is a lot of oblique stuff that people who love the book will recognize. Lines that I love, like “In you, I have created something wretched.” Or (the creature) calling himself “a blot.” Blot is such a great term. There’s a lot of phraseology that comes from the book, but also the central idea of these quintessentially philosophical and religious questions: Who am I, what am I doing here and what makes me human? These are things that I think are explored in a beautiful way in the book and alchemically translated to the movie.
But you changed the ending, after Victor pursues his creature into the Arctic wastes.
DEL TORO In the book, the creature abandons himself to nothingness; in the movie, to the grace of the light of the sun. So there are very different endings in the book and the movie. But I thought the duty was not to do taxidermy with the book but to make it live again.
This story first ran in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
